


How to Be Invisible

by ljs



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: AU, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-09-18
Updated: 2010-09-18
Packaged: 2017-10-11 23:18:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,802
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/118261
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ljs/pseuds/ljs
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>AU, Season Four and beyond (no comics canon). An experiment with fairy-tale: Giles and Anya just outside the story limits.</p>
            </blockquote>





	How to Be Invisible

As Anya always does on the nights she doesn’t stay in the basement with Xander, she walks out of the background and into colour, deep saturated neon-greens with silver sparks around the edges.

With Xander and the Scoobies she’s contained in one cartoon outline: Truth-Telling Ex-Demon, smarter than one might expect, blunter than one can stand, sex-mad, greedy. She’s got Cordelia’s role, she knows that, but she goes ahead and plays it for them. Not even Xander stops to wonder what she does when she’s not with them. No one really cares what a nineteen-year-old one-thousand-year-old woman does without skills or licenses or family or even a real name. No one really cares where she lives. She’s a narrative function, not a person.

But the thick cartoon lines flow into something else, softer brighter sadder, when she goes to the job she’s found outside the Sunnydale city limits and outside the story she’s been assigned. This is the story she’s chosen.

 _Bob’s_ , the neon sign over the old roadside bar announces, a starburst, a greenburst, prettier than it deserves. There is no Bob here, there never was. There _is_ colour and life and faked papers which become real.

Anya works the bar most nights – not a waitress, though, not someone who moves around the room with tray in her hand and an awkward quip on her tongue. She _is_ rather literal, although not as thick and black-lined hard as the official comic, and she doesn’t always get the customer’s jokes, which might mean fewer tips. As a bartender, she can be pretty and almost silent except for the required bartender advice at which she’s very good, and she can still rake in the cash.

Besides, she likes the distance the long, curved bar provides between her and the rest of the clientele. She’s a different kind of invisible here.

This one night, however, when she saunters into the green-rich smoke, the jukebox tunes (Tejano songs she can’t understand, yearning rock songs she can), the hum of humans and demons safe here from those Initiative soldiers, she sees him. He bends over the pool table contemplating a shot, one hand cradling a beer bottle, the other a cue, and the green baize is reflecting off his scholarly glasses. Giles looks just like he always does when he’s bent over a book researching a demon outbreak, except for the colour.

She looks again. No, he’s different here – taller even though slouched, more solid, a door open to the inside he usually conceals. Those grey edges he hides behind have wisped away, swallowed by the other side.

As she takes over from Guinevere the afternoon bartender, gets her bottles and mixers in her preferred order, smiles at Barry the drunken werewolf who’s currently face-down on the edge of the bar, she keeps glancing Giles’ way. She sees those flashes of green on glasses, sees his matching smiles. She can hear the clinks of ball against ball all the way over here. Looks like Giles is going to run the table.

She sends Maria the waitress over with a complimentary bottle of beer when he wins his game. His head snaps up – who’s the wolf here? she thinks – and he looks around until he sees her. Now he _really_ looks, the way he doesn’t in his own home where he always stammers and slides away until he’s Watcher-shadow in the corner. Here, he sees. Here he sidesteps through the crowd easy as smoke until he’s there, tall and solid just on the other side of the bar.

His smile is richer, the colour from the game still deepening him. "Hello, Anya. Thanks for the, er...."

"Bad American beer?" She smiles at him. "No problem. On the house."

"Thank you." Only a hint of hesitation. "I’ve never seen you like this–"

"Working?"

"Illuminated." He nods at something behind her, and she spins around to see herself in the mirror behind the bar. She looks like she’s centre stage, spotlit and ready to fly.

The mirror shows her reaching back and catching Giles’s shoulder, pulling him into the light too. Two smiles, four smiles, real and reflection.

And that’s how it begins.

Within the Sunnydale limits they keep to their own places: cartoon girl, smoke-grey Watcher. Whenever they meet at Bob’s, however – and Giles starts coming in every night there’s no Slaying or Initiative crisis or gig at the coffeehouse – he sits at the bar, and they talk. No one’s seen how lonely he’s been, how bored, but with every conversation about Demon Hells She’s Known or Strange Phenomena He’s Researched, she gets a clearer picture. He’s living off his inheritance – "in so many ways," he murmurs, his eyes on the straw he’s bending between his fingers – watching everything fade away but still trying to do the right thing for his job and his adopted family.

She knows _just_ how hard it is to do the right thing, even when the story’s written for you. Especially then. Sometimes the lines just sound wrong.

He listens too, asks her about the things she can’t say in Scooby meetings or the Bronze or those other times when the cartoon outline has to flip through her assigned pages, giving the illusion of movement. She remembers, and she laughs in the midst of the starbursts. They play pool after the bar closes, a hand to each other’s back, a press toward the table when it’s each other’s turn. Green is now her favourite colour.

After Adam is defeated, the Scoobies all have their popcorn-and-movie-and-bad-dream night, no lovers invited. She misses Giles so much that night, misses his wit and his sadness and his solidity – but then he shows up just before closing and takes his accustomed seat and the beer she gives him.

"You were in my dream. Centre stage. You were a bloody star, Anya," he says quietly, his gaze focused on the wet glass counter, his finger tracing something in the water left by her cloth. It takes a minute to realize he’s outlining her shadow. She’s softer brighter deeper after his finger passes by.

.....................................................

He’s ready to leave Sunnydale, he really is. He’s so tired of being invisible except at that bar outside the city limits. He’s so tired of touching Anya like a friend even there, just Giles, clearer to her than he is to anyone anywhere else but still the heart of him hidden. He’s sure his story is done in this bloody town.

But then Buffy asks him to stay and help her find an answer to her own mysteries, and he can’t think of a reason to say No.

It’s Anya in one of their endless, looping, grain-and-hops-fuelled conversations who pulls out of him his old story about wishing to be a grocer or a pilot. She says that she always wanted to exchange goods and services too – "I raised bunnies until I learned they were _evil_ ," she says with the fervour of the convert, and, his hand covering hers to hold her still, he laughs until he cries. He’s got to cry to keep himself from leaping over the bar and fucking her against the mirror, burying himself deep inside her, their fingers entwined and pressed against glass, that private fantasy that’s haunted him for too long.

Later, when he’s smoke again, he remembers their shared childhood dreams of commerce, and when he opens the Magic Box he asks her to work with him.

There’s still that official script to contend with, however, and to those who don’t really watch them, nothing changes. For him, it’s an even more difficult challenge to work with, to play the words he’s given. Even in the ritual banter they dance through, not touching of _course_ not touching, he can smile inside, bite his cheek to keep back the things he wants to say. She can be irritating, certainly. And gorgeous. And irritating, for fuck’s sake.

Sometimes after she gets him with a real zinger, however, everything drops away and they smile at each other openly. She’s got a wicked wink, Anya does. No one notices.

One night she stands too close to him when they patrol in the dark; she slips her hand in his pocket (too close _Christ_ too close), and she smiles up at him. "Want a bad American beer?" she whispers. Unseen, he pinches the back of her hand to chastise her. When she laughs, high and happy, he has to shroud himself in smoke and splutter. She’s still Xander’s, Giles knows that. That’s the story.

Giles doesn’t go to Bob’s much any more. It’s too seductive, being seen, and anyway she has new calls on her attention. He misses her more at Bob’s than anywhere else. But once in a moon she shows up alone, and they play a game of pool and drink beer and speak to and past each other. Long after the night is gone, he remembers the occasional touches they exchanged. He tries not to think of those touches in the shop any more.

When he watches her move with him in the mirror across the room, green baize reflecting on them both, he longs for a different role.

Joyce dies, a shock, an expected outcome. At the hospital Anya throws herself into his arms – Xander having failed to see her again – and they embrace briefly, solidly, like they’re huddled in the corner at Bob’s. Her tears dampen his shirt, and he’s more bereft when she leaves him than before. Grief piles on grief, a wall around him.

The spring rolls on, with a hell-god on the loose and danger everywhere. He doesn’t get much time with Anya – for which he should be thankful, he tells himself – and then there’s flight, and terror, and so much pain, even before Buffy jumps.

The night after Buffy dies, he goes to Bob’s again. There is neither colour nor savour in the world now, only grey-shadowed failure and a hole in his side. He thinks he will drink himself to oblivion and beyond. Then Anya arrives, bandaged and sore, and slides into the corner seat next to him. "Hey, Rupert," she says, and to his everlasting embarrassment, he breathes out the tears he’s not shed since the inevitable end of his Slayer’s story.

Anya gathers him to her, his head on her breasts, and lets him silently weep until he’s empty. His eyes are too swollen to see anything, but he can feel her small solid arms enfold him, can smell her light, woody perfume. It’s a green scent, or so she’s told him.

.............................................................................

Anya doesn’t want to be left alone in a world where no one sees her any more, but she does understand he has to go. He’s Giles the dutiful, he’s Rupert. He’s the guy who’s leaving her with a bar that feels empty without him and their shop and Xander, who’s got some troll-guy behaviour issues she’s not allowed to run from.

She reads ahead, anyway, and she knows before Giles does that he’ll come right back.

They’re given more official touching when he returns – the cartoon’s been redrawn so that overly effusive expressions of emotion are acceptable, a fling of crayoned arms around his Watcher-smoke middle. In between the scripted hand-pats and hugs, they go to Bob’s a few times and play pool and talk about his money troubles and fears and new job in England, about her loneliness and her excellent ideas for merchandising including a Spell of the Month Club.

Once she thinks she spies Buffy and Spike outside in the parking lot, but right now those two are drifts of grave dirt intertwining in the air beyond the light. They don’t want to be seen any more than she and Rupert do.

He is Rupert to her now in private, when she’s smiling at him in the mirror at Bob’s. Two smiles, four smiles, real and reflection.

She reads ahead in the story, and the smile goes away.

The narrative does give them one chance, however, allowing them to see each other through the amnesia-smoke. Just like they’re back at Bob’s, they spar, they smile at each other, they caress each other’s solid bodies to reassure each other they’re here. They do what they’re supposed to with great enthusiasm. Mostly.

When he protects her from the horrible bunnies she summons, they watch magic swirl around the ceiling and floor. Seeing that, he gets a funny, considering look on his face. "Anya," he whispers, "let’s change the story."

"What? We can’t do that, Rupert." Her hands pet his chest to soften the blow, to please her real self.

But he smiles at her, and then grabs two handfuls of green magic and throws them on the floor behind the counter. It’s like the smoke becomes a carpet, lush, verdant, in between the counter and the wall. Oh, she gets it – she dives onto it and pulls him after her. Unscripted, out of range, they become invisible to anyone but each other.

They don’t have much time, but when she undresses him, she kisses what parts of his body she’s longed to see – broad shoulders, a tease of chest hair, a good solid cock with a vein that’s made for licking. Taste is a great new way to see, she thinks dizzily. Even as he shudders underneath her, he twists around to mirror her moves, kissing her neck and nibbling her breasts, delving his tongue down into hidden depths. Once their kisses pass over each other, make each other real, he pushes her down into the verdant magic. She sinks in, opens, and he sinks in, concentrates. It’s a hard fast ride, he’s opening her more, she’s holding on everywhere. The sounds of their galloping bodies coming together, coming so hard, are lost in the green.

She wants to cry when he pulls out, when he gives her back the clothes to hide her. However, he’s looking away, which means he doesn’t want her to see his own emotion. Because she does see, she kisses his bare shoulder and murmurs his name, and he rests his head against hers and they hold hands before they put on their cartoon and shadow selves again.

The green magic is supposed to be sent away when he speaks the right words, but it’s still there, hiding in corners, shading them like a canopy. The script lets them say what they really feel – Don’t leave me, God don’t leave me, No Anya I won’t. They get to kiss once out in the open, and he sweeps her off her feet, reflection of the real.

Then they take up the story where they’re supposed to, and he’s written out.

Outside the limits of the master-narrative, however, at the small studio apartment of her own that she has (depending on the episode), she gets postcards from him. He’s chasing dragons in Scotland, the first one says, and he misses her. The second one says he’s hunting the wily Gronath on the Riviera. He misses her. His small, sharp black writing on the back of the third postcard says he’s reading old crumbling grimoires in a Roman archive, nobody sees him slipping in and out, and how are you, my darling? Are you smiling at yourself in the mirror?

Actually, she’s _crying_ in the mirror, pressing the postcard to her lips.

Every postcard he sends her is saturated with green.

But she’s got a scene to play, and she goes off and nags Xander in the approved cartoonish manner. She hates that fucking wedding dress. She can feel the story looping around her neck, ready to cut her in two.

When the noose pulls tight, left alone in the middle of eyes that don’t see, she flees out of the story and back to her apartment. She strips off the wedding dress and rolls naked on the postcards, wishing she can sink into them and find her way to Rupert. But they’re just paper without power, she’s stuck here. So she gets herself dressed and goes to D’Hoffryn and takes the deal just as it’s written. She’s got more scenes to play, albeit in bloodstained clothes that don’t fit any more.

She’s long since stopped reading ahead, just taking the bad shit as it comes, so when Rupert shows up in the doorway of the Magic Box, tall and solid just as she’s always seen him in Bob’s, she’s so shocked she almost forgets her part. But he winks at her, their little signal of solidarity, and she pulls herself together to be the sweet cartoon girl. The way she flings himself into his arms fits the script, even though he pulls her too close for the Watcher-shadow, smells too real, feels too good. They can blame it on the magic, she thinks.

As she watches him fight and suffer, her tears are real. So is his handclasp, his smile, as he lies half-broken in the Magic Box where they’d stolen their moment on a carpet of green magic. She wants to cry again.

She knows now when stuff’s being written out. They’re not going to get to keep their place.

.......................................................................

After that moment of reflected glory, he becomes invisible again. He takes Willow to England – his own house? the coven? no one cares, it’s not important to the master-narrative so it’s left out – and makes aging-wizard remarks as written. He knows that great conspiracy is all around, he’s supposed to be doing something about it, but whenever he tries to research it, the words and contacts disappear like smoke. No one cares.

He does get postcards from Anya, though, messages from beyond the story just like the ones he sends her. She isn’t doing real vengeance – a twist of nose into goat-nose here, a really bad case of acne there – and frankly, she doesn’t want to be seen. Except by him, she always adds, and he can see the faint imprint of pink-stained lips always pressed next to her signature.

When she makes her heroine’s choice to regain her humanity, he doesn’t get to be there. He wanted to be, so badly, but he only gets the news on the last postcard from her. _That’s probably it for me_ , she tells him, an enigmatic phrase he needs to see to understand. He hates being elsewhere in the smoke.

He keeps the stack of brilliant green postcards in his pocket, pulls them out when he wants to feel real or stay protected from the Watchers’ blood spilling around him everywhere.

When he goes back to Sunnydale with the Potentials, the crowd of them block him from view. He doesn’t mind, he supposes. The story’s not clear on what his duty is here or why he’s here at all – he does his required apocalypse-exposition and then retreats into his shadow. There’s an enormous fuss made about him not touching anything, for no good reason that he can see. Maybe no one knows that the Watchers’ blood didn’t touch him.

The second night he gets back, he doesn’t know where he’s supposed to sleep, it’s not written anywhere. Anya appears in the kitchen with a cup of badly made tea, which she makes him drink anyway, and then pulls him out into the back garden. Moon’s up, gorgeous estranging light in which she glows – "Wouldn’t you like to go to Bob’s instead, darling?" he says, tugging on their linked hands.

"It’s not safe, not with the First around," she says, tugging back. "But I had this idea."

The Summers’ back garden is an ever-shifting space in size and plantings, not really part of the story. But there _is_ a hedge along the back, and Anya crouches down and crawls inside a hole he’s never seen before. Cursing under his breath, he bends down.

It’s a perfect small space, which she’s lined with a blanket anchored with her stacks of postcards, lit with two torches planted in the earth, and suddenly her light, woody perfume hits him in his gut like her ex-husband’s hammer. Dear God he’s missed her. Kicking off her shoes, she lies down on her side, smiles at him like she used to in the mirror behind the bar. "It’s ours, Rupert, and no one will see. I mean, obviously no one’s going to _look_ for us, but in case they do–"

"We’re hidden. You’re bloody brilliant," he says, and with some difficulty he crawls into the space. Two branches drop into place behind him, swords of green to protect them. He grabs Anya, and they roll until he’s on his back and she’s lying on top of him, gaze to gaze. He kisses her – she tastes the same, deep and real – and then, his hands smoothing the sides of her face, he says, "What do you want to do first?"

"Honey, what do _you_ think?" she says, sharp and funny as always but deeper, and her fingers steal under his shirt and tweak a nipple. "Just touch me. You remember how to do that, right?"

And so they roll again so that she’s on the bottom, so he can wrestle off her clothes and then trail his mouth down from neck, to that valley between her breasts, to the navel, and down, sucking, flicking his tongue like he’s drawing hieroglyphs, until she cries out his name. Then it’s his turn to lie back, his turn to be undressed and worshipped and sucked until he thrusts up into her mouth one last time, breathing out "Anya" as he comes. His eyes are closed, but he can still see in mind’s eye the torchlight reflecting off green.

The knowledge of their space outside the story and their stolen nights gets him through the next months, where he’s overloaded with duty and stress, where he must play the "old, boring, British" heavy for Buffy, for reasons he’s not quite sure of. Anya does her comic turns, winks at him when they get to have a public fight, teases her fingers under the waistband of his jeans when she and Xander and Dawn and that Andrew boy tackle him in the desert.

In their hidden space, however, he sometimes breaks down at the memory of those dead Watchers, all those lost and unmourned in the story, and she keeps him safe. Or she shivers in his arms, small wet-tipped nose rubbing against his heart when she confesses her own regrets and remorse. Those nights when they make love the leaves drop down against them, all but raining life in the dark. He thrusts into Anya hard and hard again, she catches him and spins him around, and he keeps her safely cradled in the hollow of his hand so she doesn’t hurt herself. The back of his hand picks up dirt despite the blanket. He doesn’t bloody care.

He does care when the story curves around to send her back to Xander. She’s angry about it, but they do their jobs, always, and he spends a couple of nights alone in their space with a bottle or two of bad American beer. Those nights the leaves seem to disappear into the dark, far away far away, and he feels the cold of desert night.

She leaves him a postcard those nights, however, and he reads her sharp, loving words by the light of the torches, his fingers pressing into the green side of the paper.

The world outside gets worse, he finds himself falling deeper into smoke. Her winks at him are forced now – while he never reads ahead in the story, she’s been known to, and he’s terrified of what she’s seen. She never tells him, and he can’t make himself ask.

The night before the end of Sunnydale they’re supposed to play some bloody game with Xander and Andrew and a Potential or two, but when it’s done, he wakes her and takes her outside with him to their room. She sits in his lap and kisses his neck luxuriantly like rain, then whispers, "Do you ever want to leave the story, Rupert?"

"Christ, Anya, you have no sodding idea." He kisses her mouth, drinks her in.

She pushes him away. "But if we have a purpose, we have to stay," she says, "don’t you think?"

He nods. He doesn’t trust his voice. She sighs, as if her worst suspicions are confirmed, and nestles back in without looking at him.

He tips her head back so he can look, so she can as well. "I do see you, Anya my darling," he says, and she echoes the words back, there in their small, hidden green space. That’s the same thing as love to them both.

Standing on the lip of a crater the next day, dreading the words he’s been given to say, he fingers the postcards he always keeps in his pocket. They’re the only spot of green in this whole bloody desert – he knows this, even though they’re hidden from everyone else.

 _This is probably it for me_. He remembers her writing that after her starring moment of illumination. He understands now, and he could echo the words back, if only she were here. God, _God_ , he should have kept her safely cradled in his hands, script be damned.

Instead he says something about the fucking mall, and the Scoobies speak their lines, and they troop off to the bus, just as it was written. He doesn’t get to cry. She’s not here to hold him any more.

Afterward he doesn’t have much of a narrative function. He goes to rebuild the Council of Watchers (in Cleveland? London? must be London for symmetry), while the rest of them scatter. He shrugs on the tweed jacket he’d so gladly left behind years ago. He gets a small, book-lined office, and the assistance of that Andrew boy. He’s still there to play the old, boring, British heavy, but he doesn’t have a lot of lines.

He still keeps his postcards in his pocket, close to his heart.

One dreary day shortly before tea, there’s a knock on his door. "Come in," he says, expecting a Slayer-child or a new Watcher. He doesn’t plan to look up, until he feels...a change. He smells a light, woody perfume –

It’s Anya, bright and gorgeous, looking as she’d done at Bob’s the first day he truly saw her. "Hey, Rupert honey," she says, and she braces herself on the doorjamb and swings in, out, in, out, like the shivering of branches in the wind.

"Hello, Anya," he says, and since they’re alone he adds, "my darling," and then he waits for this to make sense.

She smiles at him, an illumination, a starburst. "See, here’s what I’m thinking. So I’m dead, and what are you any more... just a voice on a telephone, Watcher-guy, bad guy of the patriarchy, right?"

"Right. Mostly. Just an obstacle," he says cautiously.

"So I’m thinking that’s just the _same_ as if you’re dead! In the story, I mean. Anybody could play that part."

"That’s...logical."

She stops swinging and extends her hand to him, and his gloomy little office begins to shine in the reflection. "So why don’t you leave, honey? We’re not really here any more, so we can go off exploring. You know–" and her voice drops into confidentiality – "I really, really wanted to see those dragons in Scotland you told me about."

"You want me to leave the story," he says, in what sounds to him like a profoundly stupid voice.

"Are you even still _in_ it?" she says, as she steps inside.

When she touches him, he feels a shudder of release, not just sexual, more than that. He catches her hand, kisses her palm, draws a new lifeline on it with his tongue.

Wriggling, laughing, she says, "I’m taking that as agreement. So come on, Rupert. Let’s blow this popstand!" He lifts his head, raises his eyebrows. She makes a face. "Yes, fine, that sounded dumb. You know what I mean."

"Shockingly enough, my darling, I do," he says. "And you’re fucking well right."

He catches up a few things he might need and throws them into his briefcase – his best dagger, a few of his most treasured books, a map of the known world, an outline of the unknown. He checks his pockets for his wallet and his postcards. Then, catching her hand again, he says, "Let’s find out what’s out there, Anya."

"Now that’s the guy I’ve always seen," she says, and at last she kisses him. "Welcome back." Which is foolish, because it’s she who left him, but he doesn’t pursue it.

Together, then, they go outside. At the first step onto the stone path beyond the door, the world explodes into possibility, into _green_.

But that, as they say, is another story.


End file.
